You have a distinct feeling of discomfort within yourself and it’s having a negative impact on your life. You’ve used affirmations daily for weeks or even months to change the way you feel.

You’ve said them quietly and you’ve said them out loud. You’ve heard about others who’ve used them with great success—even healing themselves of ailments in certain cases. You’ve written your affirmations down and even plastered them all over your home so you can see them everyday.

Do you find yourself nodding to the above? Maybe you’ve experienced positive changes in your life as a result of using affirmations. If so, then you’re most definitely on the right track—good for you.

On the other hand, you might be feeling completely fed up and disillusioned instead. The problem is, despite doing it all, things haven’t changed for you. Your attempts at using affirmations has had the opposite effect and you feel worse about yourself more than ever. If so, there’s likely to be a reason.

Why your affirmations may not be working

When it comes to affirmations, it’s very much about emotions as well—there needs to be some kind of agreement between what you say and how you feel when you say it. If you say your affirmation without backing that statement up with the right internal feeling, there is discord. When you have discord between what you say and the way you feel, the chances of that affirmation having any beneficial effect on you and your life decreases greatly.

Think about it for a moment, you want to feel good about yourself and let’s say, more comfortable in social settings. Most of the time you feel awkward, which leads to feelings of embarrassment.

You decide that you’re going to use affirmations to help you relax and get comfortable with who you are so you can be yourself. The problem is that if, when you state your chosen affirmation(s), you continue to feel bad, that affirmation is going to be absolutely useless to you.

Why? Because whilst you’re stating ‘I feel good about myself’ and ‘I’m comfortable being myself’ (or any other statement you choose to use), deep down you may be thinking something along the lines of ‘but, I don’t’, therefore, creating conflict.

You can try to deny that you’re affirmation isn’t working in the hopes that it eventually will at some point, but it won’t make any difference. If you get a ‘yeah right’ or ‘I wish’ feeling, you’ll hardly be excited, inspired and moved enough to want to make changes that will get you the result you want.

If, however, you were to focus on how being at ease within yourself would make you feel and make up an affirmation based on that, then the chance of feeling any internal resistance is reduced to nothing.

The difference between ‘I feel good about myself’ and ‘the thought of feeling good about myself everyday makes me feel so ‘fill-in-the-blank” is huge. You’ll know it’s the right one for you if you feel some kind of sensation in your body.

If you are one of those people wanting to feel more comfortable within yourself, which one of those statements do you think you would be happier stating? When you say the second affirmation, it gives you an idea of how you would feel once you’re ‘there’.

In other words, it puts you in the right frame of mind and gets you more excited about what you need to do to feel more of what you’ve just felt. That way, when you start on your journey to feeling good in your own skin , obstacles won’t feel so much like Mount Everest and they will eventually be trampled on by the visions and thoughts you hold inside your head of how you want things to be.

When you use the right affirmation for your situation, it should cause feelings of excitement, joy and happiness and even make you smile. It should make you want to take action. So, the next time you use an affirmation, check for how comfortable – or uncomfortable – you feel. If it doesn’t make you feel good, don’t use it!

Using them in the right way will see you moving steadily towards your goal.